And eminently thus it was with Guendolen. While in her good aunt's priory, she had ever seen the serfs of the church well looked after, well doing, not overworked, not oppressed, cared for if sick, comforted if sorrowing, well tended in age, a contented if not a happy race, so far as externals only were regarded, and nothing hitherto had led her to look farther than to externals. On her father's princely barony she saw even less of them than she had been accustomed to do at the priory, passing them casually only when in the fields at hay-making or harvest work, or pausing perhaps to observe a rosy-cheeked child in the Saxon quarter, or to notice a cherry-lipped maiden by the village well. But here, too, so far as she did see, she saw them neither squalid nor starved, neither miserable nor maltreated. No acts of tyranny or cruelty reached her ears, perhaps none happened which should reach them; and of the rigorous, oppressive, insolent, and cruel laws which regulated their condition, controlled their progress, prevented their rise in the social scale, fettered and cramped their domestic relations, she knew nothing. Since her sojourn at Waltheofstow, she had gained more personal acquaintance with her down-trodden Saxon countrymen and countrywomen, and more especially since her accident in the forest, than in all her previous life. For, in the first place, Sir Philip de Morville, being unmarried and without female relations in his family, had no women of Norman blood employed as attendants or domestics in the castle, the whole work of which was performed by serf girls of various degrees, under the superintendence of an emancipated Saxon dame, who presided over what we should now call the housekeeper's department. Of these girls, Edith, and one or two others, Elgythas, Berthas, and the like, ministered to the Lady's Bower, and having perhaps contracted something of unusual refinement and expression from a nearer attendance on the more courtly race, and especially on the Norman ladies who at times visited the castle, presented, it is certain, unusually favorable specimens of the Saxon peasantry, and had attracted the attention of Guendolen in a greater degree than any Saxons she had previously encountered.